3. It Expands Open-World Roaming Options
Free roaming can sometimes get boring after a while when you're all on your own. If you have seen the beaches, countryside and desert of San Andreas once you have seen them a thousand times and a lot of the pedestrians who team throughout the open would can tend to be vapid, non-interactive entities that have no entertainment value at all. Now you can interact with the other two characters and for the first time ever play tennis and take part in a variety of other side-games such as working out at the gym. Having someone else to pal around with (and potentially cause mayhem with) suddenly freshens up the idea of free roaming throughout the open world. In past games I have grown tired and somewhat frustrated with being the only character in the entire Grand Theft Auto universe with any sort of unpredictable AI - the addition of two more like-minded characters suddenly makes the idea of free roaming seem all that more fun.